A Computer Program Predicting Steady-State Performance of a Nuclear Research Reactor's Cooling System

The performances of a nuclear reactor are directly affected by its cooling system, especially when it uses wet towers to evacuate the heat generated in the nuclear reactor core. Failure of the cooling system can yield very serious damages to most of the components of the nuclear reactor core. In this work, a computer program simulating the thermal behavior of a nuclear research reactor's cooling system is presented. Starting from the proposed start-up data of the reactor, the program predicts the cooling capacity of the nuclear reactor while taking into account the current climate conditions and also monitors the behavior of the thermal equipment involved in this process and this for different levels of power. The proposed simulation is based on a set of heat transfer equations representing all the equipment making up the cooling system up to the nuclear reactor core. Owing to the proposed inter-connected set of equations used to predict the thermal behaviour of the system, this program allows the user to modify at will a specified parameter and study the induced resulting effects on the rest of the system. The computer program developed has been experimentally validated on an operational system generating 6.8 MW and the obtained results are in good agreement with experiment. The results produced by the program concern the capacity of the cooling system to evacuate all the heat generated in the nuclear reactor core while taking into account the current climate conditions, the determination of the optimal number of thermal equipment that need to be engaged, the monitoring of the reactor core's entry end exit temperatures as well as the temperatures of all the components of the cooling system. Moreover, the program gives all the characteristics of air at the exit of the cooling towers and the loss of water due to the cooling process. (authors)